Bad science info from Childhood

The stegosaurs had a second nerve ganglion in their tails. Not exactly a brain. You know, now that you mention it, I dont even remember hearing about the stegosaurs lately.
We used to carve up planaria and let them regenerate from parts.
In my early days in the field, I remember that Plate Tectonics was just a new thing and the only isostatic models we had were Airy and Pratt numbers. Continental Drift changed lots of geophysical constants that sent a lot of guys who were giants in the field , to early retirements. Back before plate tectonics everyone believed that mountain masses only moved vertically and that mountain building was a result of deep troughs filling with sediments that eroded off the forelands.
Theres a good recent book by JW Rodgers , on the history of continental drift theory from Wegener and Hesse to the present. Its amazing how many notables just hung it up and said "screw it" I spent too much time learning one orthodoxy, I sure as hell aint gonna learn its replacement.

Come to thibk of it , Einstein never accepted quantum mechanics and , as a result, was pretty much marginalized in his later years

A good listing of Junk Science, pseudoscience, and superstition Skeptics Dictionary

It almost a clearing house of laboratory urban legends.

Rap

In 70's and 80's, I heard that there were two kinds of foods: 1) alkaline and 2) acidic after digested, and that one should take both kinds of foods in an appropriate balance.
Today this distinction seems to have no validity any more.

I learned, at a very early age, that women had one more rib than men, thus proving the creation story. Honest.

Are we talking bad science taught in school, or picked up in the play ground?

Playground.

If one eats apple/watermellon seeds, you'll grow fruit in your belly.

Only if your older sisters feeds you mud pies first.

Actually, we had a "Golden Book" on the earth when i was a child, which was cautiously enough written, that i cannot recall it's statements having been contradicted since then (1950 or thereabouts). Mostly, it would suffer from the lack of knowledge gained since then.

It's like the brain in the tail thing--rather than try to explain to elementary school children what a nerve ganglion is, very likely, someone just arbitrarily decided that it would be easier and more symbolically effective to simply state that they had two brains.

That book we had supplied me a good basis for the learning i acquired in the succeeding years, and although i do not assert that it was 100% in the terms of its day, it was carefully worded. I don't know how many times i heard or read something and thought to myself, "Hmm, that don't sound plausible."--because it was at variance with the learning base i had been provided.

Everybody knows that the seeds will pile up in your appendix and your appendix will rupture and kill you dead.

I thought that this was a lie that only Catholic kids were fed

They never fed me that story . . . but, then, they were probably too busy beatin' god's love into me . . .

This reminds me that at one time we learned that the tongue had particular taste receptors on particular sides of the tongue, but more recently I heard that was not entirely accurate.

It makes more sense that the tongue would have a symetric dispersal of receptors.